Let it be said upfront that in this more enlightened time, legendary photograph Weegee is not the kind of person that is given a lot of sympathy. He is, to put it in current vernacular, “problematic.” His most famous period of work, the period covered in this biography Weegee: Serial Photographer, had him combing the […]

The pressure to do something a little more than make a transcript of your life seems to build on autobiographical cartoonists as they get older and realize that the lives of most people who sit down to capture this stuff are not that remarkable. Not that they are bad lives or unworthy lives or anything […]

The concept of fake news existed long before Trump, and conspiracy theorists have also, but one difference between now and even a decade ago is that the institutionalization of misinformation has exploded and brought it more into the mainstream. Seth Rich conspiracy theorists, Pizzagate advocates , 9-11 truthers, Obama truthers, and the nearly-constant chant of […]

Blackbird Days, an anthology of shorter work by Italian graphic novelist Manuele Fior, gathers stories from the past decade, but this is no casual gathering of independent creations. Fior’s themes stretch richly through the various works, creating a uniformity wherein so many collections there are none. In “Help! Hilfe!” a missing Italian child in Germany […]

In America, extended families that are defined by alienation seem to be the result of dysfunction more than anything else, but I’ve found that Europe has multiple instances born of migration, war, disease. Roots are cut by hardship and survival, with some of these strands leading to America. In Portugal French comic book artist Cyril […]

When the biographies of so many celebrated male artists are revealed as chronicles self-destruction where the subjects too often allow themselves to become awash in their weakest points, this biography of painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle is refreshing. It’s not only that her story provides a counterpoint to the tortured suffering fetishes presented […]

The Angouleme-winning Monsieur Jean series by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian is celebrated here with It Don’t Come Easy, a collection of some of the latter-day stories in the series, a grouping that covers Jean’s settling down and finds other characters in the cast doing some semblance of the same. These stories often get compared […]

A silent, surreal meditation on the human condition in context of the natural world, Kingdom/Order takes as its hero an unnamed man in an unnamed city and in drawing connections between this urban dweller and the so-called “wild kingdom” finds the commonalities between the two might be largely built on desire. Reid Psaltis’ meticulous black […]

On the surface, I, Parrot is a madcap farce about taking care of 42 parrots as it snowballs into absurdity on almost a surreal degree. Taken on all levels, writer Deb Olin Unferth and artist Elizabeth Haidle have crafted a lovely fable about gathering all the precious pieces that make up your life and giving […]

Strangers in an unnamed European rural area, Carl and Rita have moved into a house on stilts in the water, the last of its kind where storms brew and the house’s fortitude during those storms is an uncertainty. It’s Cold In The River At Night presents this setting as foreboding panorama as the setting for […]